Being a citizen in America today feels a bit like being the student at the bottom of the class. We are continually reminded of how we are falling down on the job. Not enough of us vote. Not enough of us go to meetings, write letters, join clubs and other organizations. Too many of us don't participate. Too many of us have forsaken the public for the private. The result of our neglect is that our social capital, our civic capacity, the sustaining fibers of our democracy, are fraying. We are letting the rest of the class, the rest of the school, down.

Stretching back to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is an awareness of the connection between how we act in our everyday lives and America's institutions and overall character as a democratic society and culture. Tocqueville's specific observations about our national character--as joiners and belongers, for example--remain a reference point to this day. But his underlying interest was in exploring how America's democratic ethos affected a wide spectrum of American life--from religion to the arts, from war to relations between the sexes.

The current rap about our defects as citizens reaffirms the existence of a connection between what citizens do in their everyday lives and the vigor of American democracy. But now causation seems to be running in the opposite direction: The focus is less on how our democracy affects us and more on how what we do affects it.

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